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Moroccan rag rugs |
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Axel Steinmann / Gebhart Blazek |
| © GEBHART BLAZEK |
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Anyone familiar with the lively Moroccan rug and carpet market will have noticed the emergence in recent years of a previously little known type of ‘rag rug’ (called Boucherouite or Boucherwit, from Moroccan Arabic bu sherwit, ‘a piece torn from pre-used clothing’, ‘scrap’) which marks the (provisional) end of a development in which the traditional materials used for weaving (mainly sheep’s wool) are rapidly being augmented and substituted. This development is an inevitable consequence of widespread economic, social and cultural changes in Morocco’s rural areas: with the move away from nomadic animal husbandry to settled farming and other modern forms of rural employment, wool as the primary raw material for the production of carpets for Moroccan domestic use has become ever rarer, and replacement materials have become ever more important. The materials used include recycled rag strips and yarns from a variety of ‘found’ textile remnants including wool, cotton, synthetic fibres, Lurex, nylon and plastic.This development started during the 1960s and 1970s in the plains – mainly settled by Arabs – around the towns of Beni Mellal and Boujad. |
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From about 1990, the making of rugs and carpets with the most diverse substitute materials and in a style largely liberated from traditional models gained acceptance even in remote Berber tribal areas of the higher Middle and High Atlas mountain regions. Unlike the situation with traditional knotted-pile carpets made before the 1950s and 1960s, which were primarily devoted to regional stylistics, no conclusions as to the regional origin of these ‘rag rugs’ can be drawn on the basis of either technical characteristics or specific stylistic features. The attribution to Boujad, a term often heard in the marketplace, is therefore misleading for these rugs insofar as, although they are certainly close to rugs from the Boujad region from the second half of the 20th century in their highly individual style that is free from all rules, nowadays they are made all over Morocco in a very similar fashion. |
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If one focuses on the unusual materials used to make these rugs which – like traditional sleeping carpets – were produced for domestic requirements without any commercial intention, then the best examples reveal an incredible creative vitality, an adaptive continuation of Moroccan textile culture using contemporary means. |
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205 x 130 cm (6' 10'' x 4' 4'') rag, industrial fibres, wool |
205 x 130 cm (6' 10'' x 4' 4'') rag, ind. fibres, wool |
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| CRAZY RAG RUGS FROM MOROCCO |
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Sensory human beings One of these days some of us may come to the irrevocable understanding that we owe the essential part of our acquired knowledge and view of the world less to our teachers and the culture in which we grew up than to the diverse experiences rooted in the connection which we once, as a child, had with nature. For a child, the world into which it is thrown is reduced to that which he or she sees, feels, tastes, hears and touches with their senses. We touch matter with our hands; it rings in our ears or makes our skin crawl; it dazzles our eyes, fills our mouth: solid, fluid, gaseous matter, acoustic or shining, raw, porous or silky. The given fact penetrates the sensorium and descends through the arteries and muscles, nerves and bones to the tips of the nails. There is nothing in the senses that does not subsequently goes towards culture. |
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| 140 x 150 cm (4' 8'' x 5') rag, cotton, wool |
110 x 125 cm (3' 8'' x 4' 2'') industrial fibres, wool, cotton |
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We come into the world as sensory human beings, but only a few remain so. Occasionally one’s own creative activity coincides with art, not forgetting the feelings that we have springing from primary impressions such as colours, sounds, tastes, smells and pain. Bit by bit, due to their activity, the senses engender body and soul. The surrounding world teaches the individual to understand his own nature more or less as a detached fragment, and shows the whole from which he comes. Like a rag rug, the ego is made up of pieces and fragments. Human beings find a sense of self through the familiar surroundings of the group, from worldly preoccupations and the landscape around them, finding the material to take form, to formulate themselves. |
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| 165 x 90 cm (5' 6'' x 3'), recycled industrial fibres, rag | 170 x 90 cm (5' 8'' x 3'), recycled industrial fibres, rag |
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| 230 x 95 cm (7' 8'' x 3' 2''), rag, recycled industrial fibres |
185 x 90 cm (6' 2'' x 3'), rag, industrial fibres, wool |
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In the flow of time Observation of nature permits one to understand how time flows. The first mild afternoon in May, a foggy December morning, mountains shrouded in cloud, solstice and equinox, decelerations and accelerations, freezing and thawing; here the waters flow, there they collect. Nature tells of rhythms and orchestrates reality into a kind of symphony, the sequences of which are also well known to the wives of the shepherds and farmers of Morocco. Time begins in rhythm. It flows like the rivers and mountain streams that pour by, pause, rise, divide, join together or peter out. Once the play of time has been grasped, experimentation leads to contemplation of the infinitesimal and the cosmological, to comprehension of the infinitely small and the infinitely large logics that are active in space. The fractal form is recognised, the quality of self-resemblance, the part representing the whole, the fragment as an expression of the entirety: a fern’s form is repeated in a leaf, which appears in turn, on a reduced scale, on one of its side branches; details are considered from nature’s universal construction plans. Here a fissured relief, there a smooth surface, fine granulations, the interplay of colours, perfumes, sounds and noises. In this way worlds can be invented, bizarre universes created, through which one travels with the soul, which keep the mind moving and enrich the power of the imagination.
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Sensations Regardless of the relevant economic system, in the Mediterranean region there have always been a few fundamental objectives largely shared by the local population groups. Among these are the numerous precautionary measures taken to prevent one’s living area being overlooked and to remove women from the gaze of strange men, with the intention of protecting their honour (or that of their menfolk). This contrast between the public and private realm, between male and female zones, provides the Amazigh women of Morocco’s farming and nomadic class with a degree of “free space” in which they can express their own views on life in textile art but within the prevailing social norms that regulate human relationships. Thus in the social scenario of the household these social traditions make everyday space viable, visibly materialising a specific way of life, an art de vivre. In the seclusion of the home the women concern themselves with the basics of the social fabric: with the body and its physical well-being, with its health, its beautification. A body that is symbolically multiplied: by tattoos which give the body an initial social identity; by pottery (built up free-hand, without a potter’s wheel) with its practical and/or ritual functions, repeating the image of the “body-as-container”; and by weaving, perhaps the most complete and artistic “extension” of the ego. Like a symphony, with the help of strips of remnants of recycling material, synthetic fibres, Lurex, nylon and plastic, the female weavers of today compose their colour-fast, variegated time/spaces, since it is time itself which bears their memory, a memory that they wrest from varied oblivion, a memory that makes it possible for them to return to the darkness of time and of the body, to the hidden origins of topology, to the beginnings, where the sense of vision is absorbed into the sense of touch, where the delicate, sensitive sense of touch sees, smooths and separates the surface composition. Origins, which lie a whole age further back than the arrival of words and writing (even if their emergence is heralded).
The weaver is never concerned with imitation of the nature that surrounds her, with the mere rendering of perceptions, but rather with percepts, with bundles of sensations and relationships. In her work she creates sensory aggregates, weaves or knots. A composition results, which is her work on the sensation. No imitation, no experienced sympathy, no imaginary identification, no resemblance, although there is a resemblance but this is purely produced. Everything (including the technique) takes place between the complexes of sensations and the aesthetic compositional level. The weaver always designs a compositional level that, for its part, conveys an amalgamation of sensations under the influence of aesthetic figures or devices. But not the sensation or impression of a tree, mountain, river, time, sound, aroma or movement, but that of the concept of a tree, the concept of time, the concept of movement etc.
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| 230 x 90 cm (8' x 3'), industrial fibres, wool | 235 x 140 cm (7' 8'' x 3' 2''), rag, wool, industrial fibres |
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| 190 x 135 cm (6' 4'' x 4' 6''), recycled industrial fibres, rag, wool | 200 x 155 cm (6' 8'' x 5' 2''), recycled industrial fibres, rag, wool |
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| 190 x 145 cm (6' 4'' x 4' 10''), rag, recycled industrial fibres, cotton | 180 x 165 cm (6' x 5' 6''), rag, recycled industrial fibres, wool |
| Patchwork identities |
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We speak with several voices. The world sees itself as a multitude of identities, surrounded by their neighbourhoods and particular sets of circumstances, joined to one another by traffic intersections, which for their part become villages and towns and are joined to one another by roads, the local character of which can only be detected with difficulty. People travel right round the world today out of admiration for what can be seen in its own ecological niche. Body, plane, planet: all are in motion. The world never rests. Things, appearances and processes are in perpetual movement and interaction. Everywhere, incessant development. The world merges from landscape to panorama, from local to something universal. Within his or her body, the wanderer sums up routes, landscapes, customs, languages, mixing them up. Rampant traffic intersections, which fill a local area with their striations and folds, their bends and loops, their coverings and fissures. Generalised traffic intersections: towns and villages, gardens and oases, deserts and oceans, countries and changes of location, the so-called concrete or the ostensible abstraction, the poetry fragment and the colour spectrum. |
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| 170 x 100 cm (5' 8'' x 3' 4''), recycled industrial fibres, rag | 220 x 110 cm (7' x 3' 8''), rag, industrial fibres, wool |
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| 230 x 115 cm (7' 6'' x 3' 10''), recycled industrial fibres, rag | 185 x 85 cm (6' 2'' x 2' 10''), recycled industrial fibres, rag, wool, lurex |
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| 250 x 100 cm (8' 4'' x 3' 4''), rag, industrial fibres | 200 x 90 cm (6' 8'' x 3'), rag, industrial fibres |
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| 255 x 90 cm (8' 6'' x 3'), rag, industrial fibres | 170 x 135 cm (5' 8'' x 4' 6''), rag, cotton |
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| 160 x 75 cm (5' 4'' x 2' 6''), industrial fibres | 280 x 110 cm (6' x 3' 8''), rag, wool, cotton |
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The catalogue 'boucherouite' in which these articles have originally been published is available on the 'BOOKS + CATALOGUES' page. Axel Steinmann, Gebhart Blazek: 'boucherouite', exhibition catalogue with a comment by Daniel Spoerri. Graz, 2009, 64 pages, 47 full page coulor plates + 8 color photos, English/German, soft cover. Euro 25,00. |
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Dr. Axel Steinmann is the curator of the Orient department at the Ethnological Museum in Vienna carpet photos by Julius Steinhauser translations by Jenny Marsh video still from the film 'Tapis, Parterres du Maroc', 1946-56 |
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| boucharouette, boucherouite, bouchraouit, boucharouit, boucharouite, boucherwit, bou sherwit, bu sherwit, bouchrawit, boucharwit |
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Bibliography:
Vandenbroeck, Paul, 2000. Azetta. L’Art des femmes berbères. Gent-Amsterdam: Ludion, Palais des Beaux-Arts de Bruxelles. |
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please view a fine selection of boucherouite rag rugs in the 'carpets' section of the website |
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Rags to Richesse: Rugs from Morocco in friendly co-operation with: CAVIN-MORRIS GALLERY
>>>>> REVIEW by Holland Cotter in the NEW YORK TIMES, 23rd of July 2010 |
